Corporate media warn of gridlock and unhappy shoppers while laughing off WTO protests as "carnival of derision". Larry Bensky reports from Seattle.
Readers of The Seattle Times, one half of that city's daily newspaper duopoly, had an appropriate contradiction delivered to them on Thanksgiving morning, just five days before the World Trade Association's 6,000 delegates, bureaucrats, and attendant media hit town. To assure them that all was normal on the traditional day of gluttony, there, plump on their doorstep, was the Times, its 160 pages fattened with no fewer than 28 pre-printed advertising inserts. But the lead headline belied the reassuring consumerism of the advertising-stuffed daily. "Retailers Fret Over WTO: Protests May Disrupt Business," screamed page one. Another story was sounded an equally doomy note: "Parking Won't Be Easy."
Parking and shopping, shopping and parking, ran the mantra in Seattle's media as the WTO---and a predicted horde of at least 50,000 protestors---approached. The accompanying back-story conjured up visions of protestors from hell, arriving with cop-killer bullets, biological weapons or, at the very least, intricate plans to gridlock Seattle's already nearly gridlocked downtown freeway system.
Reading Seattle's mainstream press or listening to its corporate TV and radio outlets this past week, it was easy to ignore the fact that something serious was going on---other than a potential glitch in shopping till dropping, that is---inside the WTO meeting hall and outside on the streets. One group of environmentalists, labor activists and anti-corporate protestors, desperate to tell their side of the story, resorted to hijacking a daily newspaper, or at least four pages of it, on Wednesday.
"Boeing to Move Overseas" was the lead headline on Seattle Post-Intelligence, a parody four-page wraparound mirroring the typography of Seattle's other daily, the Post-Intelligencer. Joe Hill, the legendary labor activist sentenced to death for his militancy early in the century, was the "news correspondent" for that story, which said that "with global trade liberalization proceeding at a smooth pace, there was no reason not to move" to Indonesia, where Boeing's workers would be paid $3.20 per 16-hour day.
Other bylines in the Post-Intelligence included Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental activist executed by that country's dictatorship, who wrote from Washington about agricultural exports impoverishing poor nations; Emma Goldman, the legendary feminist and anarchist, analyzing the WTO's power; and slain Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, whose story was headlined "Economists Fear Global Epidemic of Underpollution."
The real Post-Intelligencer's officials were not amused. Editor and publisher J.D. Alexander was quoted the next day in his own news columns as saying the parody was "a deplorable act of vandalism...deliberately designed to mislead readers." Who was misleading whom is an interesting question for a debate about the media, one which the parody P-I undertook gleefully in an editorial: "The World Trade Organization is a complicated topic...much too complicated for the feeble minds of our readers to fully comprehend...therefore we're going to lie our fool asses off during our WTO coverage. We will repeatedly tell you that world trade means jobs, but not that the WTO is a tool whereby corporations rewrite the laws of nations. We will repeat the accusations that WTO critics have not done their homework, without giving them any forums to display their understanding of the issues. On the protests, you can safely take any estimate we publish of demonstration crowd sizes and multiply them by nine to arrive at a truer estimate of size. Any 'violence' that erupts will be the responsibility of demonstrators; we will ignore the 'nonviolent' horses, batons, mace, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and guns deployed by security forces. We will marginalize demonstrators wherever possible: photos will show the most outrageous costumes. We will emphasize conflict, property destruction, violence, and hostility; the 99% of peaceful, non-violent demonstrators are boring.
"We would never ignore these demonstrations. It's too big and exciting a story. But we will make a point wherever possible to lie so as to deny their credibility. After all, if the protestors are correct and free trade is a threat to the world's environment, standard of living, health and safety regulations, labor rights, and democracy, then we must be called upon to act. And we're quite comfortable running our newspaper business and lying to you each day, thank you. Now go check out the comics. What's your horoscope?"
The media's blurring of the serious issues that will bring tens of thousands to Seattle has spread far and wide. Eight hundred miles down the coast, Monday's San Francisco Chronicle, for example, carried the front page headline, "Seattle Fears Explosion of WTO Protests; City's Image at Stake if Violence Breaks Out." The national edition of The New York Times bore the headline, "A Carnival of Derision to Greet the Princes of Global Trade," while The Wall Street Journal bemoaned the fate of Seattle corporate p.r. flacks, reduced to an underground redoubt and the use of walkie-talkies to avoid jammed cell phone traffic.
Indeed, one had to go offshore — to England, for example — for a more nuanced version of upcoming events in Seattle. "Expect out of Seattle's World Trade Organization meeting this week lurid reports of multicolored-haired, body-pierced, tattooed anarchists," wrote Guardian correspondent Madeleine Bunting on Monday. "This is a colorful way of reporting a tediously difficult trade summit, but it is a gross distortion of a crucially important event. What is depressing is that this distortion serves only one interest. The wise chief executive of a global multinational will put up with a bit of tear gas floating over his lobster lunch this week. It gives him the perfect opportunity to dismiss his critics as fanatics, as he tells those trade ministers between sips of Chardonnay about corporate social responsibility; meanwhile, his oil company continues to pour effluent into remote rivers and cut down virgin forests."
